Gut Microbiome Alterations in Patients With Thyroid Nodules

Abstract

Thyroid nodules are found in nearly half of the adult population. Accumulating evidence suggests that the gut microbiota plays an important role in thyroid metabolism, yet the association between gut microbiota capacity, thyroid nodules, and thyroid function has not been studied comprehensively. We performed a gut microbiome genome-wide association study in 196 patients with thyroid nodules and 283 controls by using whole-genome shotgun sequencing. We found that participants with high-grade thyroid nodules have decreased number of gut microbial species and gene families compared with those with lower grade nodules and controls. There are also significant alterations in the overall microbial composition in participants with high-grade thyroid nodules. The gut microbiome in participants with high-grade thyroid nodules is characterized by greater amino acid degradation and lower butyrate production. The relative abundances of multiple butyrate producing microbes are reduced in patients with high-grade thyroid nodules and the relative abundances of L-histidine metabolism pathways are associated with thyrotropin-releasing hormone. Our study describes the gut microbiome characteristics in thyroid nodules and a gut-thyroid link and highlight specific gut microbiota as a potential therapeutic target to regulate thyroid metabolism.

Effects of Smoking on Inflammatory Markers in a Healthy Population as Analyzed via the Gut Microbiota

“…This yielded a gut microbial profile that included bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, and viruses. The NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) database (2014 edition) and the HMP Unified Metabolic Analysis Network 2 (HUMAnN2) were used to annotate the nonredundant gene sets and the functional genes into Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes metabolic pathways, generating the metabolic pathway compositions (Fang et al, 2018;Li et al, 2021).…”

Structural and Functional Alterations of Gut Microbiota in Males With Hyperuricemia and High Levels of Liver Enzymes

“…All samples were tested using DNA nanospheres (DNB) based on DNA libraries construction and probeanchored synthesis technology (cPAS) (MGI2000, MGI, Shenzhen, China) based on 100 bp paired-end reads of shotgun metagenomic sequencing. The overall accuracy (OA ≥ 0.8) control strategy were used to make sure the quality control (QC) of raw sequencing reads to filter out low-quality reads (13,14). SOAPaligner/soap2 was applied to filter out human reads and hg19 was selected as the standard point of the high-quality reads (identity ≥ 0.9) (RRID:SCR_005503).…”

“…The taxonomic annotation and quantification on the base of MetaPhlAn2 with default settings were performed (15), and the generating gut microbial profiling of all levels such as bacteria, archaea, viruses, and eukaryotes were included. The HMP Unified Metabolic Analysis Network 2 (HUMAnN2) and National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) (nlm.nih.gov) database (2014 Edition) were applied to annotate the nonredundant gene set and the functional genes into Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) metabolic pathway, and then the corresponding metabolic pathways were generated (13,14).…”

Association of Differential Metabolites With Small Intestinal Microflora and Maternal Outcomes in Subclinical Hypothyroidism During Pregnancy

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